Ben Harack

Ben Harack studies the potential for AI to trigger a world war and how to prevent that from happening. He is currently pursuing a DPhil in International Relations at Oxford University.

Previously, he was the co-founder of the Vision of Earth project, the primary author of Ruling Ourselves, and one of the engineers behind the Human Diagnosis Project — a worldwide effort led by the global medical community to build an open intelligence system that maps the steps to help any patient.

Ben is also an advisor to Convergence, a research nonprofit working on existential risk strategy. He holds a master’s degree in physics and bachelor’s degrees in computer science, mathematics, physics, and psychology.

Selected works:

Selected blog posts:

Current projects:

  • Developing a bargaining model of technological existential risk that demonstrates that under most conditions, rational actors are incentivized to negotiate and compromise rather than race toward dangerous technologies.
  • Designing international institutions which can govern civilian AI (see report) and (more challenging) military AI.
  • Understanding how “social dilemmas” in game theory (such as the prisoner’s dilemma) are different under existential risk than under other kinds of risk.
  • Exploring the dynamics of technology races in the Modeling Cooperation project.
  • Examining whether the advent of truly “existential” concerns during the Cold War (due to the idea of nuclear winter, etc.) led to a shift in rhetoric, behavior, and policy for the superpowers that differed substantially from their behavior under mutually-assured destruction.

Contact

Interested in learning more about the above projects? Ben can be contacted at Ben.Harack@gmail.com